Comment of the Day: Filming an Unfilmable Book

Author Jennifer Egan isn't sure how HBO will turn her Pulitzer Prize winning novel A Visit From The Goon Squad into a weekly half-hour television series, but it's not as if non-linear narratives are impossible to depict on film. Commenter Robert Rays cites past precedent.

There are lots of ways for an imaginative and perceptive director to do it. People thought Slaughterhouse-Five was unfilmable, but even Kurt Vonnegut loved what George Roy Hill and screenwriter Stephen Geller pulled off. Look what's done in music videos. Or what painter Mark Rothko did with abstract, inchoate states of mind, mood and sensation...

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Ray Gustini is the author of Lucky Town, a forthcoming book about sports in Washington, D.C. He is a former staff writer for The Atlantic Wire.